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The True Story of ISIS’s Rise in Syria

2026-02-28 19:06:01

2026-02-28T11:00:00.000Z

In 2012, Manbij became one of the first Syrian cities to wrest itself from the tyranny of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. After the uprising began, with citizens calling for democracy outside the central mosque, the Syrian government attempted to crush it. But the regime, besieged by insurrections across the country, abandoned Manbij. At first, the city, which is near the Turkish border and has two hundred thousand residents, revelled in its liberation. Dozens of newspapers and magazines were launched, and for the first time in forty years people formed organizations without securing approval from the state. But, before a year was up, freedom had begun to feel like chaos. The new city government, controlled largely by business owners and other élites, seemed oblivious to the problems of the poor. The price of bread soared as bakery owners—no longer subject to price controls imposed by the regime—shamelessly profiteered. Rents doubled, then tripled, as more and more displaced Syrians crowded the city. And crime became so rampant that some citizens wondered if the revolution had been worth it. What good were “international human rights” when you were afraid to send your daughter to school because of kidnappings? What good was a republic that couldn’t provide law and order? Amid all this instability, a new group insinuated its way into Manbij: the Islamic State.

An opening for the Islamic State came one day in June, 2013, nearly a year after Manbij’s liberation, when the body of a young man was discovered by a shepherd outside town. Blood was streaked across the man’s pale face, and a section of his right temple was missing. The victim’s name was Musa Jasim. From the age of eleven, he’d accompanied his father, a plumber, on the job. They unclogged drains for the municipality—a tiring and thankless profession, but one that allowed them to build a nest egg, culminating in the purchase of a silver Saab. Musa started working as a taxi-driver. At eighteen, he married, and within a few years he had three young children and a fourth on the way.

One day, Musa was idling in his Saab at a roundabout when he accepted a few passengers and drove off. He did not return home. Ten days later, the authorities stopped a Saab, which had a new paint job, at a car wash. An inspection confirmed that the car was Musa’s. The driver was taken in for questioning, and he explained that he had recently bought the vehicle from a certain Manhal Hammoudi—supposedly, one of Musa’s friends. The authorities tracked down Hammoudi, who admitted that he and several others had asked Musa for a ride into the countryside, and that one of the passengers, Karoom, had pointed a pistol at Musa’s head. “Guys, quit screwing around,” Musa said. “This isn’t funny!” Karoom pulled the trigger. He and the others dumped the body in the bushes, repainted the Saab, and sold it for seven hundred and fifty dollars.

The murder appalled the city, and Musa’s family demanded justice. Karoom and the others were arrested, but a proper trial seemed unlikely. The new city government, supported by the Free Syrian Army, which had helped liberate the city, was underfunded and barely functional. Some authorities proposed executing the accused then and there, to show the public that the government was serious about countering crime. But for others this was a line they could not cross. Not only did it violate every precept of justice but what would the world think? What would Western capitals and human-rights organizations say if it emerged that the Free Syrian Army were executing unarmed civilians?

As the authorities dithered, people across the city grew restless. One activist decided to take matters into his own hands. Abdul Hadi Bisher was an energetic member of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a pro-democracy organization that had organized protests against Assad. He’d been jailed after shouting “freedom” in the streets—and in detention he’d been sodomized and waterboarded. In the year since Manbij’s liberation, though, he’d grown disgusted with the city’s dysfunctional government, under which crime and inequality had become pervasive. He began to wonder if, in order to win justice for Musa, it was time to look for a more daring alternative.

Not long earlier, a hitherto unknown group called ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—had set up an office in town, unfurling a black banner that proclaimed “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet.” ISIS members milling outside the building were heavily armed, but it wasn’t obvious to residents what their plans were for Manbij. Some of the members were foreigners from Egypt and Iraq, but others hailed from the countryside outside the city.

Abdul Hadi sought out an ISIS commander and explained the frustrations of Musa’s family. The commander listened patiently but replied that ISIS could not interfere with the judicial process in the city, because they were just one faction among many—that is, unless the people themselves demanded it. If the public lost faith in the judicial institutions of Manbij, then, and only then, could ISIS intervene.

On June 13th, under a blazing sun, Abdul Hadi gathered with some two hundred residents for a rally, with Musa’s relatives in tow. “The people want the execution of criminals!” they chanted, while marching toward the old cultural center. From within, ISIS guards watched the throngs. The door did not open.

Abdul Hadi led the procession toward Main Street. Protesters held banners decrying criminality and calling for law and order. Men and women stepped onto their balconies, watching the crowd stream past—not an unusual sight there since liberation, except that now there were no tri-star revolutionary flags, no banners calling for freedom. Instead, the word that the protesters shouted was “justice.” They wanted to be able to sleep soundly at night, to be able to send their children to school, to make a living, to simply live. As the mass moved down Main Street, it grew. Soon there were six hundred people. The procession passed the headquarters of various Free Syrian Army factions, at whom the protesters hurled bitter insults for failing to protect the city. By late afternoon, the crowd had reached the central courthouse, where the five suspects had been detained, and demanded swift justice.

Suddenly, three vehicles raced toward the crowd. Some ten ISIS members jumped out—perhaps the entire group then in Manbij—and stationed themselves around the courthouse. The ISIS commander with whom Abdul Hadi had spoken approached the building’s guards and demanded to enter. The policemen refused and ordered him back.

The commander opened his vest to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest. “I’ll use it!” he shouted. “I have no fear!”

The police backed away.

“The people of Manbij and the relatives of the deceased have asked for justice,” the commander declared. “The people have asked us to deal with this case, and we’re here to fulfill their wishes.” The stunned policemen opened the door. ISIS members gathered the suspects and stuffed them into their vehicles. As they drove off, a cheer went up from the crowd.

Later, Abdul Hadi met with several friends to discuss the astonishing episode. He hailed the commander’s follow-through—he had done exactly as he’d promised, waiting for residents to call for ISIS to intervene. These people aren’t afraid of anything, one of Abdul Hadi’s friends exclaimed. Perhaps they were exactly what the city needed.

Locked in a room at ISIS headquarters, the five suspects desperately tried to work out a plan. It turned out that only three of them, including Manhal and Karoom, had been present at the murder scene. One of the other two was Manhal’s brother, Ayman. He was just sixteen, and he had known nothing about the crime. Manhal was pacing the room, near tears. Ayman, moved by his brother’s plight, offered to confess to the crime. Because he was underage, he expected lenience.

At the time, ISIS was an obscure organization. But it soon became known around the world as an armed group bent on establishing a caliphate governed by Sharia law. For most Westerners, the phrase “Sharia law” conjures images of sword-wielding fanatics with medieval sensibilities. Traditionally, though, less than ten per cent of Sharia—which means “religious law” in Arabic—relates to criminal injuries like murder, rape, or theft. The rest concerns prosaic matters of marital and family relations, commercial transactions, and ritual.

In the early years of Islam, when states hardly existed as such in the Arab world, Sharia helped communities to manage their own affairs, based on a set of guidelines drawn from the Quran and on the sayings of the Prophet. The system emphasized community stability and accord. In the case of murder, for example, the victim’s next of kin had the power to decide remedial action: they could choose retaliation, or accept blood money, or grant a pardon. Judges often encouraged the payment of blood money, and, in the early centuries of Islamic rule, capital punishment was applied far less than one might expect. Other penalties, like stoning in the case of adultery, were severe but almost impossible to implement in practice: there had to be four male witnesses to the act of penetration.

Sharia law waned in influence as many Arab lands succumbed to foreign domination. In the post-colonial era, Arab dictators established secular laws, but these legal systems favored the ruling clique. By the nineteen-seventies, some Arab thinkers had begun looking with nostalgia to the halcyon days of early Islam, when everyone, from the caliph to the lowliest peasant, was—so they imagined—subject to the same law.

In Syria, this remained a minority view. At the beginning of the revolution in Manbij, almost no one called for imposing Sharia. The collective dream was for a new, democratic structure that could replace Assad’s ossified legal regime. But, after eleven months of self-rule led to a surge in violent crime and yawning inequality, nostalgia for a purer form of justice began to crop up in the pages of the press and in public lectures.

One day, half a dozen foreigners from ISIS held a meeting with Abdul Hadi and other members of the Revolutionary Youth Movement. An ISIS commander told Abdul Hadi that his group harbored no interest in accruing political power in the city. Instead, members devoted every waking breath to restoring Sharia and, by doing so, heralding a new era of blind and impartial justice. Abdul Hadi came away fascinated.

The ISIS contingent then invited Musa’s father to visit their headquarters, where the suspects remained in their custody, and presented him with an option straight from Sharia: As next of kin, what redress did he want for the spilling of blood?

Musa’s father was a kindly old man, and he said that he was willing to pardon everyone in the car that day—or almost everyone. He was stuck deep in the recesses of shock and grief at the loss of the boy who’d labored by his side for so long, a boy who’d never harmed anyone and who had sat behind the wheel of that silver Saab from sunrise to sundown for the family. He could not, try as he might, forgive Karoom, who pulled the trigger. “Let the others go,” he said, weeping. “Let them go, but, for God’s sake, I don’t forgive Karoom.”

The next morning, July 5th, gunmen appeared atop the Manbij Hotel, which overlooks the city’s central square. Flowing from the roof to the street was the massive tricolor flag that revolutionaries had hung on liberation day. Over the months, citizens had written on the fabric the names of men and women lost to strikes by the Assad regime. The flag had become a landmark, a giant adornment in the heart of downtown. The gunmen removed the revolutionary flag and replaced it with the black banner of ISIS. The new flag was four stories long.

Jihadi singing blared through the speakers. Masked ISIS members set up a stage. Across town, word flew from tongue to tongue that the group would announce its judgment against the murderers. A large crowd—including senators and other members of the city’s revolutionary government—gathered outside the hotel. At the entrance, busy setting up tables and pasting ISIS flags onto the wall, was Abdul Hadi. He’d never had much time for religion, but he was impressed by the group’s seriousness.

A jeep drove up, and a man wearing a vest laced with explosives stepped out. Three men, hooded and shackled, were herded onto the stage. The singing ceased. The man wearing the explosives took the microphone. He introduced himself—in an Egyptian accent—as the “prince” of a nearby ISIS branch. “I swear by God, we did not come here with the aspiration of ruling over you,” he began. “We only want to implement God’s law on earth.” He spoke about the role of Sharia throughout history, its application in the glory days of the early Islamic empires, its disappearance with colonialism and the secular dictatorships. He announced that the time had come to revive God’s law.

Because ISIS feared God, the Egyptian went on, it wanted the people of Manbij to fear God, as well. God had prescribed in the Holy Quran the limits of human behavior, and those who feared His majesty should submit to His laws. No human community can survive, he continued, without justice. A community in which man is free to kill or rape is no community at all—it is the jungle. “Here, in Manbij, the people have suffered the rule of the jungle, and the God-fearing among you have beseeched us to apply God’s law,” he said. He then recounted the murder of Musa Jasim, his betrayal by people he believed to be his friends, the stolen car, the confessions. He added that the criminals had been a gang that had raped and killed others—they had kidnapped a ten-year-old girl, repeatedly raping her for a week and then killing her.

A gasp went through the crowd. No one had heard of these additional crimes.

The Egyptian declared, “It has fallen to our judges to implement God’s wishes, and because of these heinous crimes, these men”—he read three names, including those of Karoom and Ayman, the sixteen-year-old who had made the false confession to save his brother—“are hereby sentenced to death.”

A cry rose from other ISIS members: “God is great!” The crowd was silent.

Masked ISIS fighters chiselled three indentations into the hotel’s façade. The three prisoners were dragged to the wall and made to kneel, their backs to the crowd, their heads fitted into the indentations. A fighter in a balaclava read out a statement containing several verses of the Quran pertaining to the punishment of criminals, and pronounced that “these people were not wronged by anyone, but they wronged themselves by committing murder and theft.”

The gunmen took aim. The prisoners remained still. No one in the crowd budged. Maybe they wanted to understand this new order, to fill their hearts with it. Maybe they had simply had enough. Maybe some stayed for the sheer pornography of it all. Shots were fired, the bodies jerked, and the cry rose again from the masked men: “God is great!”

ISIS fighters loaded the bodies onto the back of a four-by-four and drove this grim exhibit slowly through the streets. The crowd did not disperse.

Suddenly, someone shouted, “Airplane!”

There was a mad scramble—people running in every direction, some tumbling over others. But when they eventually looked up, they saw nothing but blue. The cry had been a ploy by ISIS to get everyone to leave.

That evening, a relative of Ayman, the slain sixteen-year-old, went to the old cultural center and confronted the Egyptian ISIS leader. “How can you execute someone?” he demanded. “Who gave you the right?”

“We are only implementing God’s law.”

“But, according to Sharia, the next of kin has the choice, and he chose to pardon Ayman.” The relative reiterated that Ayman had confessed only to save his brother. The ISIS leader countered that Ayman was guilty of heinous crimes, including rape.

“Which girl is this that they raped? Show her to me.”

He did not receive an answer, and was asked to leave. In fact, there had been no rape, no criminal gang—the trumped-up charges were ISIS’s way of insuring popular support for the executions. The group even spread the fake news to various newspapers, which soon reported that all three of the deceased had been guilty of rape.

Abdul Hadi had helped set up the stage; he’d even arranged for the sewing of the black flag. But he had not expected executions in a city square—he’d been certain that there would be a timely public trial, followed by imprisonment. He told his friends that he felt as if someone had plunged a knife into his stomach. He could not sleep for days. He found one of the executioners, a Tunisian, and asked how he could sleep at night. The Tunisian replied, “It was the first time I’ve killed, and let me tell you, in my entire life I have not slept with such peace as I slept last night.” Abdul Hadi found himself without words. He swore to his comrades in the Revolutionary Youth Movement that he’d never go by the ISIS headquarters again. But they could not hide their disgust. “What did you expect?” a friend demanded. “Do you know who you are dealing with?” One by one, they quit the Revolutionary Youth Movement and avoided Abdul Hadi. He was now on his own.

The next day, a freshly painted message was written on the wall of the old cultural center: “The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria invites citizens to register any concerns about life in the city with us.”

With the loss of his friends, Abdul Hadi began turning up at ISIS headquarters, spending hours sipping tea and watching battle videos. He wasn’t sure what to make of the wild-haired men at the cultural center, or if he could even trust them, but with them, at least, he did not feel alone. He had often mocked rival brigades for adopting Muslim names; now he quit drinking and studied the Quran. His former friends joked that he had begun dressing like someone from Afghanistan.

The executions had shaken many Manbij residents, but others—disturbed by the crime and disorder—were grateful that someone was finally willing to take a stand.

ISIS, emboldened, began to make forays into the city’s political life. It launched the Fertile Crescent, an assembly that held Quran-memorization competitions for children, conducted lectures on Islamic history, and distributed alms to the poor. ISIS also founded a charity, which held lectures on Sharia, Arabic, math, physics, and chemistry, to “raise awareness of science.” At the start of Ramadan, ISIS members handed out dates and figs to families displaced by the war, and contributed to citywide collection efforts to provide poor families with a free iftar meal, to break the day’s fast. These activities, in the context of rising prices and insecurity, won the newcomers growing respect. A newspaper called al-Ra’y al-Horr (“Free Opinion”) ran an interview with a preacher who declared that ISIS fighters have a “zeal for religion and God’s law . . . but they can’t rise up on their own.”

The Fertile Crescent Assembly resolved to “clean up” the city by scrubbing the walls of slogans praising democracy. Supporters of the revolutionary government, which had been chosen in a citywide election, watched ISIS’s campaign with alarm. They vetted the imams of the city’s forty-two mosques, to insure that they were still preaching the local Sufi brand of Islam, which was not hostile to democracy.

The city council, meanwhile, cracked down on drug peddlers and shut down Manbij’s sole bar: they could not afford to let ISIS paint the government as dissolute. City officials also proposed banning black flags at demonstrations. They lost the vote—not because the majority favored such flags but because some politicians worried that the law would trample free-speech rights. In the end, the proposal backfired, as residents who harbored little interest in black flags began hoisting them as an assertion of their freedom of speech. Islamist groups in Manbij began organizing rallies with a sea of black fabric waving in the wind.

ISIS decided to up the ante.

The Great Mosque in downtown Manbij offered free lessons on Quranic interpretation, and the instructor, Sheikh Abu Saeed al-Dibo, was one of the city’s most respected scholars. He’d published books of poetry, a history of Manbij, and a treatise on Orientalism.

On July 9, 2013, he was delivering a lesson when an argument broke out between him and a young Tunisian in the class, who was a member of ISIS. At issue was Sheikh Dibo’s description of the prayer that locals tend to say when visiting a grave; to the ISIS member, such prayers were sacrilege. The heart of the matter lay in when, or to whom, one might pray. Sheikh Dibo was schooled in Sufism, one of the dominant strains of Islam in northern Syria. Sufism held at its center the strange, fantastical, miraculous figure of the saint, to whom one might pray for miracles.

To ISIS, which owes its theological roots to the austere Islam of Saudi Arabia, worshipping at the tombs of saints was rank superstition. In fact, praying to saints or ancestors elevated them above the status of mere mortals, effectively denying the singular might of God. Sheikh Dibo’s instructions on how to pray at the grave, as innocuous as they may have sounded to most Manbij residents, struck the Tunisian ISIS member as a disavowal of monotheism itself.

As the argument grew heated, Sheikh Dibo could not believe the young foreigner’s insolence. The sheikh had studied religious law at Damascus University and earned a master’s degree in Lebanon; the Tunisian had not completed a day’s worth of religious study in his life, relying instead on YouTube videos and stray sermons. “I have as many qualifications as you have years in age,” Sheikh Dibo declared. To the Tunisian, though, that was precisely the problem: Islam was saddled with such men, who acted as gatekeepers to true knowledge. Saints, imams, and sheikhs stood between the individual and God. By rejecting such figures, ISIS was attempting something akin to the Protestant Reformation for Islam, in which the religion would be open to anyone who chose to believe, direct and unmediated. To Sheikh Dibo, this sounded like madness. “If you want to learn about your religion, I’ll teach you!” he thundered.

That evening, ISIS summoned Sheikh Dibo to its headquarters. They debated doctrinal issues, and finally ISIS made a plea for pluralism: in a free city, the people should have the right to hear different views on the question of saints. Let different ideas compete in Manbij; let the people decide. To which the Sheikh responded, “I’ll give you the pulpit over my dead body.”

While Sheikh Dibo sparred with ISIS, a rumor spread through the city that he’d been detained. Hundreds of people collected across the street from the old cultural center. Under the glow of streetlamps, they chanted, “Out, out, out! The Islamic State get out!” A man shouted into a camera, “ISIS is just like the Syrian regime!” A protester later exclaimed, “We’ve been praying here since our grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ time. Now these foreigners are going to tell us how to worship God?”

When the news reached ISIS headquarters, the commanders there allowed Sheikh Dibo to leave. This was the first time demonstrators had called for the group’s expulsion. ISIS members realized they might have gone too far.

The following evening, ISIS and its Fertile Crescent Assembly organized a lecture in front of the old cultural center. An ISIS member announced that the organization would be holding a religious-trivia contest that night, followed by a talk on the current state of Manbij. Among the prizes on offer were figs, gilded Qurans, and perfumes. ISIS had also organized activities for children, including hide-and-seek. A comedian delivered riffs about Assad, about how he’d been sired by donkeys, and the audience was in stitches.

An ISIS member took to the dais and argued that Manbij should be ruled by religious law—not by drunkards and thieves—and that people should not be seduced by democracy, which promises the world but cannot even put food in bellies. A bag of bread now cost a hundred liras—seven times what it had cost when Manbij was “liberated.” Olive oil and other staples were similarly out of reach.

ISIS, he explained, had fought many battles outside the city, and was building a new empire—an Islamic caliphate where nobody would go hungry or live in fear. “Peace and prosperity will only come with Sharia!” he shouted. The crowd applauded.

That September, ISIS seized the city’s grain mills, on the ground that the ruling élite was changing so much that everyday people were starving. But the group still didn’t control the city. All autumn, ISIS continued its propaganda offensive, holding seminars detailing life under religious law. They culled examples from the history of early Islam, when the differences between rich and poor were, they said, minimal, when leaders were bound by a moral code that superseded their earthly whims. They told stories of the leaders of the first Muslim communities—caliphs—who kept greedy merchants at heel, enforcing price controls. They extolled zakat, the ancient practice of giving alms to the poor, one of the five pillars of Islam. They disseminated videos and pamphlets promoting the glories of living in a caliphate—universal public housing, free health care, cities so secure you could leave your doors open at night. No more kidnappings, no more checkpoints. No more families torn apart, with sons in far-flung lands, sweating under the hot sun in construction sites, returning home only once a year. The picture was of an Islamic welfare state, where cities were ruled not by the wealthy or the well connected but by the just.

ISIS members opened educational centers in Manbij to teach basic science and history. They dispatched volunteers to visit the ill and the wounded in hospitals, distributing dates and milk. They gave Qurans and perfume to patients. They took up collections at mosques for displaced people. Wherever they went, they swore that, under an Islamic state, the government would provide such services. Manbij had known fear and division for too long; under their rule, it would know brotherhood and sisterhood. The greatness of the city would be measured by the fates of the least among them.

The revolutionaries who ran Manbij could not understand the allure of such a message. They hadn’t risked their lives for free health care and price controls—they had braved bullets and prison for values greater and more noble than material goods. In a statement, the elected senators of Manbij reminded the city: “We declare that this revolution is a revolution of dignity and not a revolution of the hungry! Because if we were hungry, we would have accepted the Assad regime, under which bread cost fifteen Syrian liras!”

After a year of crisis upon crisis, these words felt tone-deaf to most residents. Those who spoke loudest about “dignity” were those who did not have to worry about their next meal. They did not have to send their sons off to foreign lands to beg for work.

One morning, two masked men approached Sheikh Dibo and fired. He died instantly. ISIS then began warning the city’s independent newspapers and threatening its elected politicians. The pro-democracy revolutionaries attempted to rally the masses to march against ISIS, as they had over the summer. But now, after months of spiralling prices, few people were willing to stand with the elected city government.

In December, Manbij witnessed a freak blizzard, one of the harshest in memory. ISIS members immediately seized the advantage. They plowed roads and markets, and volunteered as traffic police. They distributed free bread in the central square and in the camps for displaced people. They demanded price controls and denounced rapacious landlords. ISIS was now the most popular entity in the city, armed or civilian.

Eight months of painstaking political work—building coalitions, establishing civic front organizations, circulating propaganda, well-timed theatre—had won ISIS a decisive following. Revolutionaries had braved bullets and prison to overthrow the dictatorship and build a fledgling democracy. In the beginning, they had the allegiance of the masses, who marched through the alleyways and plazas chanting in praise of freedom. But now people spoke only of the prices at the grocer, the cost of rent. The city had exhausted itself, and people hoped not for liberation but deliverance.

Syria is hardly the only example of this phenomenon. Persistent economic inequality has long sounded democracy’s death knell. In the latter years of the Roman Republic, landowners amassed unprecedented riches while plebeians floundered, spawning resentment that infected many corners of society. In the context of this soaring inequality—that is, of ordinary people’s loss of power—there appeared, for the first time, populist politicians like Julius Caesar, who promised reforms while accruing dangerous degrees of power themselves. Other élites fiercely resisted the populist surge but refused to make meaningful concessions to address the citizenry’s core grievances. Ultimately, civil war led to the fall of the Republic and the rise of dictatorship.

In 1848, a popular uprising in France overthrew the monarchy, demanding universal manhood suffrage and wealth redistribution. The revolution established government-owned workshops that employed the poor, but were bitterly opposed by the wealthy. A conservative government shut them down, prompting bloody riots. Eventually, the masses voted for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the famed emperor, in a landslide. He styled himself as all things to all people—a paragon of order to the right, a champion of the poor to the left. As soon as he was elected, he cracked down on the freedoms of press and assembly, and later dissolved parliament. Before long, he declared himself emperor.

Aspiring tyrants inevitably promise security and food on the table. The masses, demeaned and starved, see in tyranny a tantalizing elixir of equality and self-respect, which will liberate them from élite domination and deliver them from want and anxieties.

On January 24, 2014, ISIS took over Manbij. That morning, Abdul Hadi climbed onto the roof of a grain silo. He ran his eyes over the vista below—the concrete blocks and warrens smelling of exhaust. He would inhabit a new city, one different than he’d ever known—the streets without squalor, the streets busy with purpose, peopled by men and women joined in common struggle. It would be a city of workshops and warehouses, simple mosques and well-kept cemeteries, but there would be no gates or lines, no rich or poor. This would be his city of justice.

The Islamic State’s tyranny drew on the cultural resources of the Middle East—Islam—while Assad’s tyranny drew upon a different but also uniquely Middle Eastern heritage, Arab nationalism. Yet the tyrannical impulse of authoritarian populists is the same across the world. In one context, the authoritarian is railing against non-Muslims; in another it is immigrants. No matter the trope, the forms of mobilization are identical: those who feel powerless and hopeless, who are embittered by the rapacious greed of élites controlling their democracy, will begin to question the idea of democracy. If tyranny is where democracies go to die, inequality is the cause of death.

The caliphate ruled Manbij for two brutal years—years of summary executions and punitive amputations. Once people realized that the Islamic State’s promises were false—that the only security they were granted was one of desolation—it was too late. One by one, residents who’d been enthralled by ISIS’s message tried to escape the city. Sometimes they succeeded, but often they were hunted down. By the time Abdul Hadi realized how wrong he’d been, there was nowhere to turn. An American-backed coalition obliterated the group and destroyed large parts of Manbij. Abdul Hadi spent his days hiding in hovels in distant parts of Syria, turning his mind obsessively over the old days of revolution, over fleeting encounters and terrible choices. He has never been able to return home. ♦

The BAFTAs, and the Sloppy Pieties of Liberal Entertainment

2026-02-28 19:06:01

2026-02-28T11:00:00.000Z

The comedian Conan O’Brien will host the Academy Awards in two weeks. How will his writing team metabolize the stupefying scene at this year’s BAFTAs into his routine? It seems obvious that they will have to mete out some clever response to the episode being called, in a succession of words worthy of Richard Pryor, the “Tourette’s N-Word Incident.”

This is what happened, if you somehow missed it. The actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, of “Sinners,” had come up to the lectern at the ceremony in London to present the award for Best Visual Effects. Some actors loosen in this setting, embracing the role of “presenter” the way they would a character, whereas others stand ramrod and deliver the script on the teleprompter clean, as if in a trance of professionalism. This is a funny aspect of awards ceremonies, seeing shyness, discomfort, or the individual personality of well-known performers cut through, and being made aware, so bluntly, that our beloved screen stars are employees with jobs. Jordan and Lindo were giving it straight when an outburst of the word “nigger” interrupted their speech—a disruption that was audible to everyone in the room, and to those watching at home, on the BBC. Whatever Jordan and Lindo may have been thinking, however they wanted to react, was suppressed by their internal reserves of restraint—the kind of restraint cultivated by figures who know that they are always being watched. Shock registered in their expressions, but they kept on.

In attendance at the ceremony was John Davidson, a Scottish activist well known across the United Kingdom for his efforts to destigmatize Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that can manifest in involuntary verbal tics. He is also the subject of the 2025 feature film “I Swear,” a feel-good comedy about the trials of his life, which was nominated for several BAFTAs. (It won for Casting and Leading Actor, with Robert Aramayo—who portrayed Davidson—beating out Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, and others.) Davidson has coprolalia—uncontrollable obscene speech—hence the pun in the title of the film. At the start of the program, a stage manager had told the audience that there might be some outbursts; following the moment with Jordan and Lindo, the host of this year’s ceremony, the Scottish actor and director Alan Cumming, made note of the “strong language” the audience had just heard, and thanked the crowd for keeping a “respectful space for everyone,” later reiterating that “the tics you’ve heard tonight are involuntary.” In stressful situations, such as attending a high-stakes awards show, for example, tics can intensify; Davidson made other outbursts throughout the ceremony, and eventually decided to remove himself to a private screening room.

The extraordinary failure, in my opinion and in that of many others, of the responsible agent—the BBC—is now utterly apparent. Davidson had been seated near a microphone, amplifying any outbursts he would have made. The ceremony, secondly, runs on a tape delay, airing two hours after the live event, meaning that the broadcaster failed to edit out the slur for the final cut. The ceremony runs on that tape delay ostensibly so that the production team can shave time off the proceedings and fit the broadcast into a preordained two-hour slot, but in so editing, the team molds the awards show, an event that is somehow both increasingly volatile and increasingly arcane, into a polite package for viewers. What trips the censor, and what does not? Akinola Davies, Jr., who won the Outstanding Début award for his speculative semi-autobiographical drama, “My Father’s Shadow,” ended his speech with “Free Palestine”; the production team made sure to cut it for broadcast.

The ricochet of information in the next few days made the extent of the fuckup almost comically exhausting. It was an ugly week on the internet, a fruitful car crash for explanatory cultural punditry. The word cloud of implicated themes was a mushroom: disability; racism; intersectionality; British humor; American violence; “le wokisme,” for the French. Interviewed at a party after the ceremony, Lindo said that he wished “someone from BAFTA spoke to us afterward,” indicating that no one on the awards-ceremony team thought it prudent to address him or Jordan. Davidson quickly became a subject of scrutiny and rage. The first statement he issued, in which he wrote that he was “deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning,” was found wanting by some members of the public, who thought it dismissed, or demoted, the offense done to Jordan and Lindo at the expense of explaining the terror Davidson lives through every day. In a subsequent public gesture, an e-mail interview with Variety, Davidson said that he would “appreciate reports of the event explaining that I ticked perhaps 10 different offensive words on the night of the awards,” and that “most articles are giving the impression I shouted one single slur on Sunday.” Davidson added that the BBC, which has made, over the past four decades, several documentaries about him, had promised that it would edit out his swearing—some of which, like when Davidson shouted “pedophile” during one of Cumming’s bits about “Paddington,” it evidently did. Other people living with Tourette’s took up this mantle of public education, including Jumaane Williams, the public advocate for New York City, seeking to explain the neurological basis of coprolalia and to dispel the spectre of inevitable intent when it comes to “nigger,” that exemplar of violently loaded speech. Others didn’t want to hear explanation, suspicious of a larger culture that considers anti-Blackness the usual weather, on some psychic level, basically tolerable.

The BBC issued something like an apology to Lindo, Jordan, and Davidson, but not without praising the “dignity and professionalism” of the Black actors, which, from one angle, reads as condescending placation. The BBC claims that the producers didn’t hear the word “nigger” on the broadcast. The audibly stunned audience, and reports that Warner Bros., the studio behind “Sinners,” reached out to the BBC to request the cut before the broadcast aired, make it harder to believe that the slur could have gone unnoticed.

I am completely weary of apology theatre. This was an aberrance by definition and by form; our collective sanity depends on retaining the ability to parse out instances of this kind of ambient shock and pain. This was a situation that need not become a referendum on Davidson, on divining some inner hatred in the man; what we can consider is the sloppy pieties of liberal entertainment. What could have been controlled was the edit. Intentional or not, the episode and the ensuing controversy take on the tinge of rage bait, of bears profitably poked. The BBC spent energy and resources politically castrating its program that would have been better spent protecting its vulnerable guests. It is not fair to expect Lindo nor Jordan to act graciously here. Nor is it fair to expect Davidson to continuously flay himself for the public’s satisfaction. ♦

How High-Powered Lasers Became Part of Donald Trump’s Border-Security Complex

2026-02-28 19:06:01

2026-02-28T11:00:00.000Z

Veronica Escobar, a four-term House member from Texas, went to bed early on February 10th. She represents Texas’s Sixteenth Congressional District, which includes most of El Paso, and serves on the House Appropriations Committee; the following morning, she was scheduled to attend a subcommittee hearing on the possible impacts of the then looming government shutdown on the Department of Homeland Security, and she wanted to get a good night’s rest. Around 11 P.M., Escobar was startled awake by a phone call. “My immediate concern is, ‘Is it my kids? Is it my mom? Has something happened?’ ” she recalled. It turned out to be something even more unexpected: an air-traffic controller from El Paso was calling to alert her that the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered the near-immediate closure of the region’s entire airspace for ten days—a move effectively unprecedented in the country since 9/11.

Escobar began calling her leadership team, and other officials in Texas and in the federal government. “There were just a million questions swimming through my mind,” she told me. Her first thought was that perhaps President Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, had decided to bomb cartel targets in the city of Juárez, across the border from El Paso—something that various Administration officials, including the President, had been threatening to do for months. “If my community was about to be put in harm’s way,” Escobar said, “we had very little time to act.”

But each conversation that night was more baffling than the last; no one seemed to know what was happening. “I began thinking, I don’t think that we are at risk—I don’t think there’s anything for the community to be afraid of,” she said. “Phone call after phone call, there’s one word that kept coming to the surface in my brain, and that was ‘incompetence.’ ”

The Pentagon, she soon learned, had lent Customs and Border Protection a high-energy laser, which the military had been developing to counter aerial drones. Without notifying the F.A.A., the agency had used it to shoot down what it suspected was a cartel drone smuggling drugs across the border. Instead, the target turned out to be a drifting party balloon. The F.A.A., fearing for civilian aircraft, had ordered the airspace closed. By morning, the closure had been lifted, but El Paso residents were now calling Escobar with panicked questions of their own: Should we flee? Are we at risk?

For anyone who has followed border security during the past two decades, a controversial shooting by C.B.P. is hardly surprising—in at least six incidents documented by the A.C.L.U. since 2010, Border Patrol agents have fired across the border, killing people in Mexico, including a father barbecuing in a park with his family, and a sixteen-year-old who was shot in the back eight times after someone on his side of the border fence allegedly threw rocks at an agent. But a high-energy laser used to target drones was new. While much attention has focussed on D.H.S.’s urban enforcement efforts, in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, Trump and Republican congressional leaders have also turbocharged security investments along the nation’s northern and southern borders, delivering new weaponry, technologies, and infrastructure, including dozens of miles of new border wall, a first-term promise of Trump’s that, contrary to his long-standing campaign pledges, is now being fully paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

The numbers are staggering. Altogether, the so-called Procurement, Construction, and Improvements budget for C.B.P. totals some fifty-three billion dollars for the current fiscal year, with another twenty billion dollars available in its “operations and support” budget—a major increase from the roughly three billion dollars that the agency had been spending annually on construction in recent years. Indeed, that fifty-three-billion-dollar allotment is roughly equal to the entire 2024 defense expenditures of Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, and Norway combined.

In the wake of the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, congressional Democrats refused to help fund D.H.S. unless Republicans agreed to reforms of the agency’s immigration-enforcement practices. The department’s funding ran out on February 14th, leading to a partial shutdown of the nation’s third-largest Cabinet department, and congressional negotiations appear to have made little progress in the days since—with Democrats demanding, among other things, that the department require agents to wear visible identification and body cameras, ban the use of masks, and end racial profiling. The irony is that, even as many parts of D.H.S. are shut down and staff at agencies like the Transportation Security Administration are working without pay, the immigration operations at the heart of the debate are funded separately and thus continuing undiminished. In fact, the border’s spending spree is only gathering steam.

According to the C.B.P., since Trump took office last year, the agency has issued about $11.4 billion in new border-wall contracts, part of a goal of hitting two hundred and fifty miles of additional barriers by September. Many of the largest new contracts, totalling just over three billion dollars, have gone to “smart wall” construction projects by a company known as BCCG A Joint Venture, an entity that shares an office-suite address in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, with a large-scale general contractor called Caddell Construction. Another six billion dollars in new border-security funding is set to flow to Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota company that helped Trump’s former campaign adviser Steve Bannon build a portion of supposedly privately funded border wall during the President’s first term; Bannon and three others were indicted, in 2020, by the Justice Department for defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with their “We Build the Wall” effort. (Bannon’s federal prosecution was preëmpted by a pardon from Trump in 2021; he pleaded guilty on state charges in New York in 2025, but received no jail time.)

Earlier attempts by D.H.S. and the Border Patrol to build “smart” border walls have ended poorly. An effort led by Boeing, launched in 2006 and known as the Secure Border Initiative (SBInet), ran months behind schedule and its tech was pooh-poohed by the Border Patrol agents who had to use it; by 2008, only twenty-eight miles of the prototype virtual fence had been erected, and cost estimates to secure the whole border had soared to thirty billion dollars. When the Obama Administration finally shut down the project, in 2011—with just over fifty miles operational—Representative Bennie Thompson, then the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, called it a “grave and expensive disappointment.”

But to peruse the federal-contract database for C.B.P.’s flood of spending is to see just how profitable the border-industrial complex has become since the start of Trump’s second term. Three separate contracts, totalling as much as four hundred and forty million dollars, have been awarded to the Silicon Valley defense darling Anduril Industries, which provides D.H.S. with a network of some three hundred autonomous surveillance towers that it estimates cover about thirty per cent of the southern border. In February, Wired reported a new billion-dollar D.H.S. purchasing agreement for the Peter Thiel-founded software company Palantir, which will allow Palantir, a maker of cutting-edge data integration and analysis tools, to largely bypass competitive bidding for new government projects. (Some Palantir employees have begun to question how their work is being used by ICE.)

In some ways, the torrent of money is exactly as anticipated. In September, 2024, Tom Homan, who had previously been Trump’s acting head of ICE, allegedly accepted fifty thousand dollars in cash in an undercover F.B.I. sting operation, in which agents posed as businessmen seeking lucrative border-security contracts in a second Trump term. (For reasons that remain unclear, the case seems to have disappeared since Trump’s election, and Homan was promptly named the President’s new border czar. Homan denies any wrongdoing.)

Many of ICE’s largest contracts, meanwhile, have gone to CoreCivic and the GEO Group, for-profit companies that ICE contracts to run detention facilities. A third company, Acquisition Logistics L.L.C., is contracted to run Camp East Montana, a new detention facility in El Paso, which is eventually expected to house five thousand beds. The facility happens to be on the military base Fort Bliss, where the Pentagon has been testing that high-energy anti-drone laser. The site, which was formerly used to intern Japanese Americans during the Second World War, has become a hub of harrowing reports of inhumane conditions, including a case involving a detainee who a witness reported was choked to death by guards. (D.H.S. denies any claims of inhumane conditions, and a spokesperson said that the detainee who died was attempting to kill himself when staff intervened to help him.) The ICE contract to run Camp East Montana is worth as much as $1.3 billion. Acquisition Logistics, which was founded in 2008, is based out of a residence in Henrico County, Virginia. News reports from last summer, when the contract was first announced, pointed out that the company had no known experience operating detention facilities, and its largest government contract had previously been worth around seventeen million dollars.

The murkiness of Acquisition Logistics’ involvement in El Paso is hardly an exception among many of the companies profiting from the border-security gold rush. Contracts worth tens of millions of dollars list just six or eight words of brief descriptions, such as twenty-seven million dollars for Deloitte, for “Systems Division Program Management Support,” or a half-billion-dollar contract for the Beltway I.T. contractor CACI that’s described blandly as “Border Enforcement Applications for Government Leading-Edge Information Technology.”

The contracting database also shows ICE and C.B.P. working to field and equip a literal army’s worth of agents and officers: ICE has spent $1.1 million on Glock-19 duty weapons for its officers, more than eight hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars purchasing “5.56MM RIFLE SUPPRESSORS AND ACCESSORIES,” nearly a million dollars on “less than lethal chemical munitions,” and another four hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars to purchase “red dot handgun sights” for its agents’ weapons. This is in addition to numerous contracts for the new hires themselves, including ninety-two thousand dollars in uniforms from a Nashville outfitter for a C.B.P. Academy class, part of a larger sixty-one-million-dollar workwear contract; as much as twenty-six million dollars for background checks by a Colorado-based company that has long helped with government hiring; and a twenty-five-million-dollar contract to a Florida company for “Pre And Post-Employment Medical, Drug, And Fitness Examinations” for C.B.P.’s new hires.

The U.S. border—particularly the southern border, with Mexico—has been heavily militarized since 9/11. For most of its history, in fact, the Border Patrol has been a place where America’s wars come home—where war-surplus machinery is repurposed for domestic policing. Some early border fences, which went up immediately after the end of the Second World War, were taken from Japanese internment camps; after the war, the Border Patrol received surplus airplanes to make patrolling easier.

Today, eight aerostats, high-tech tethered surveillance blimps, are deployed along the border, part of an airship fleet that includes hand-me-down “tactical aerostats” formerly used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. A fifty-two-million-dollar contract supplies the department with so-called light-enforcement helicopters, and the aerospace company Northrop Grumman has been awarded a nearly nine-hundred-million-dollar contract to maintain its P-3 surveillance aircraft. C.B.P. also has its own fleet of unmanned five-ton MQ-9 Predator drones, similar to the armed platforms that the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have used to target terrorists overseas, from Pakistan to Africa, which the agency uses for “persistent surveillance” along the border. (Last summer, the drones were used in Los Angeles during a series of anti-ICE protests, leading to criticism by congressional Democrats and civil-liberties groups.) On February 26th, less than a month after the birthday-balloon mishap, the U.S. military shot down a C.B.P. drone using the same type of high-energy laser that originally caused the airspace closure in El Paso. The most recent incident both underscored the lack of apparent coördination about advanced border-security technologies and raised new safety concerns for the F.A.A., which expanded a no-fly zone over Fort Hancock, where the shootdown occurred. In a statement, a group of Democratic lawmakers said, “Our heads are exploding over the news that DoD reportedly shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone using a high risk counter-unmanned aircraft system,” calling the incident the result of Administration “incompetence.”

Escobar, the House member, told me that the El Paso-airspace incident has raised other questions about what C.B.P. is doing and where the money is going. Trump loves the physicality and toughness indicated by building miles of border wall, but the giant stretches of open border that the wall is meant to secure no longer represent the most pressing security needs. Instead, Escobar said, the need lies in renovating the overburdened and outdated ports of entry that handle daily trade, commerce, and travel between the U.S. and Mexico. “A vast majority of illegal drugs are coming into our country through our land ports of entry,” Escobar said. “One of the best investments that the federal government can make in border communities would be in renovating and modernizing our port-of-entry infrastructure.”

And yet the question of how all this money is to be spent is almost entirely absent from the current congressional-appropriations debate. Even as the shutdown negotiations focus on administrative and policy reforms to how C.B.P. and ICE operate nationwide, there’s still plenty of money for both agencies to spend. The C.B.P., for instance, has so far “obligated” just ten per cent of its supersized construction-and-procurement budget—leaving, as of late February, $47,592,145,788 still to go, a sum slightly larger than the G.D.P. of Estonia. “I am very concerned,” Escobar told me. “These contractors and these private entities are pocketing American taxpayer dollars, while their shareholders are making money hand over fist.” ♦



The Latest Columbia Student Detained by ICE

2026-02-28 19:06:01

2026-02-28T11:00:00.000Z

At Columbia University, in front of wrought-iron entrance gates that have been locked for more than two years now, a graduate student named Lily Levitt stood next to a box of whistles as melting snow pooled around her. “Free whistles!” she shouted. “Free safety whistles! ICE was on campus today!” Levitt wore a brown suède coat and gloves; her cheeks were pink. “I’ve been out here for about two hours,” she said. “People aren’t as angry as you would think.”

Earlier that day, agents from the Department of Homeland Security had entered a Columbia-owned apartment and detained a student, Elmina (Ellie) Aghayeva, claiming that, after “failing to attend classes,” her student visa had been terminated back in 2016. Aghayeva, a neuroscience and political-science double major from Azerbaijan, is also a college-life-style influencer, often posting videos—“I tried Einstein’s study routine!”—on Instagram, where she has more than a hundred thousand followers. That morning, she’d posted a photo of what looked like her legs in the back of a car, with the words “Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help.” It was almost exactly a year after ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil while he was living in university housing. (After being held for more than a hundred days, Khalil was released on bail but still faces potential deportation.)

Levitt, a student at Columbia’s Teachers College, was in New Jersey teaching when she heard about Aghayeva. “I wasn’t able to focus for the rest of the day,” she said. She had missed the emergency campus-wide rally at noon but still wanted to do her part. Hundreds of students and locals had held up signs with messages such as “No one is illegal on stolen land” and “ICE Lies.”

According to the university, the agents who went to Aghayeva’s building had falsely identified themselves as police. They allegedly were equipped with a photograph of a five-year-old girl and said they were searching for a missing child. (D.H.S. has denied the use of these tactics.) “Our security is so lax over here,” Gianna Baker, an engineering student in a backward cap and a Red Bull bomber jacket, said. “It is super easy to get into these apartments. You’re supposed to register guests, and you don’t even have to do that.”

The main campus, however, is a fortress of checkpoints, with tents stationed outside entrances and guards galore. “I haven’t even been able to let my mom in,” Levitt said.

“Can I have a whistle?” a woman with gray hair asked, approaching the box. Levitt eagerly offered her one. “Know the whistle code!” she shouted. “If the whistle sound is broken, it means ICE is nearby!”

Many students were unfamiliar with the whistle code but recognized the potential need for it. A few doors down from where Aghayeva had been detained, a drama student said that her peers were on edge: “My friend brought all of her documents to class, just in case.” Others were less worried about getting detained themselves. “I think it depends on the country you’re from and its politics,” a student from Saudi Arabia said. “Saudi has a good relationship to the U.S.” She wasn’t sure about Azerbaijan. Another international student, from Iran, said, “I know I’ve done everything legally. I’m a permanent resident.” (As is Mahmoud Khalil.)

At a bar not far from Aghayeva’s dorm, a music-education scholar was perturbed, despite having been born in California. As a first-generation son of Mexican immigrants, he said, “I check the boxes for everything they hate.” ICE is on his mind, throughout his daily motions. “Like, can I speak in Spanish in public? I think I have to,” he said, with gentle defiance.

His classmate Rachel, a Connecticut native, nodded. Grasping a glass of white wine, she said, “I listen to these seventies folk artists, like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, and it’s, like, Why can’t we all just get along?”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is more of a hip-hop fan, but he channelled Seeger when he visited President Donald Trump on the day of Aghayeva’s detainment. They discussed housing—Mamdani gave Trump a fake newspaper with the headline “Trump to City: Let’s Build”—and the Mayor raised Aghayeva’s case, urging for her freedom. Trump, seemingly smitten once again with Mamdani, relented: at around 4 P.M., Aghayeva posted on Instagram that she had been released, and that she was shaken but “safe and okay.”

The story had moved so quickly that some locals didn’t know that anything had happened at all. On Aghayeva’s block, a frizzy-haired guy recalled seeing police activity earlier. “But I didn’t know what was going on.” At a nearby bodega, the man behind the register was also unaware of the news. “That’s crazy,” he said, with a nervous smile.

As for Levitt, she eventually left her spot at Columbia’s gates—for now. She was disappointed with how few whistles she’d given out. “But I can’t say I’m super surprised,” she said. “There’s a good amount of fear on our campus.” Perhaps students were too afraid to take a whistle. She would’ve lingered, but she sensed nearby officers getting antsy. “I have more things that I need to do,” she said. “So I don’t want to be arrested tonight.” ♦

“Everyone is Overreacting” on the Tariff Ruling, Stephen Vladeck Says

2026-02-28 13:06:02

2026-02-28T04:59:00.000Z

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The Washington Roundtable is joined by Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor and self-proclaimed “Supreme Court nerd,” to examine President Trump’s increasing defiance of the Supreme Court. The panel discusses whether the Court’s strong rebuke of the President’s tariff policy obscures a broader pattern of expanding executive power through the use of emergency “shadow docket” rulings, a kind of shortcut for dealing with emergency requests. “I think that’s where the Justices have shown the most inclination to vote in ways that might be inconsistent as a matter of legal principle, but consistent as a matter of partisan political preference,” Vladeck says. Vladeck is the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.”

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The Ellison Media Empire Grows Again

2026-02-28 07:06:01

2026-02-27T22:24:37.389Z

Shortly before the Presidential election of 2016, the telecommunications behemoth A.T. & T. announced a deal to acquire Time Warner, a merger that would bring together the former’s distribution network with the latter’s vast library of film and TV properties. After Donald Trump won, the deal hit a snag: namely, CNN, which Time Warner owned and Trump hated. Jane Mayer would later report, in this magazine, that in the summer of 2017 Trump summoned Gary Cohn, the head of his National Economic Council, and John Kelly, his chief of staff, and ordered them to block the merger. Per Mayer, Cohn told Kelly, “Don’t you fucking dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.” But the D.O.J. did file suit. Makan Delrahim, then Trump’s top antitrust official, insisted that CNN’s coverage had nothing to do with the case, instead citing concerns about consumer choice and prices. According to the Times, “few at AT&T or Time Warner believed that.” Either way, a judge green-lit the deal, which closed at a valuation of a hundred billion dollars.

Years passed. A.T. & T. and Time Warner fought and broke up; the latter’s assets were spun off and merged with Discovery. Last summer, Paramount Skydance, itself a newly merged media company chaired by David Ellison, the son of the tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison, put in a bid to buy the combined Warner Bros. Discovery. It said no, thanks, but the interest did ultimately trigger a sales process, and a bidding war. Trump was, by now, back in office, and the issue of CNN again reared its ugly head. Paramount Skydance, which already owns CBS News, had courted controversy by pulling the network in a Trumpward direction; according to the Guardian, Ellison père dangled the prospect of similar changes at CNN, including the ouster of specific anchors—Brianna Keilar; Erin Burnett—whom Trump is known to dislike. By December, the Ellisons were on their heels: Warner Bros. accepted a rival bid from Netflix. (Notably, Netflix was not proposing to acquire CNN, which would be spun off into an independent company along with other cable assets.) Trump didn’t sound pleased. “They have a very big market share,” Trump said, of Netflix. “I’ll be involved in that decision.”

Fast forward to this month, and Trump was telling NBC that, actually, “I’ve decided I shouldn’t be involved” in the merger, and that “the Justice Department will handle it.” Given that Trump and his D.O.J. have themselves merged—see the new, giant Trump banner on the building’s façade—this claim seemed dubious. Sure enough, by this past weekend, Trump was bashing Netflix again, calling on the company to remove Susan Rice, a former top Obama official, from its board after she predicted future “accountability” for corporations that have bent the knee to Trump. Meanwhile, Paramount, which never gave up on its pursuit of Warner Bros., was given the opportunity to submit a final, improved offer, and did so. Yesterday, Ted Sarandos, the co-C.E.O. of Netflix, met with officials at the White House (but not with Trump himself) for talks that were reportedly cordial, yet ominous for the company’s deal prospects. Around the same time, Warner Bros. announced that it had deemed Paramount’s latest bid to be superior. Netflix had four days to counter it. An hour or so later, however, it announced that it was walking away, stunning the media world.

Netflix projected insouciance. “We’ve always been disciplined,” Sarandos and Greg Peters, the other C.E.O., said in a statement. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.” Investors and Wall Street analysts seemed to agree; various observers suggested that a tie-up doesn’t look great for either Paramount or Warner Bros. (The step-grandson of one of the actual founding Warner brothers likened the deal to “a shotgun wedding with your dumb cousin.”) Others freaked out, not least at the prospect of the Ellisons controlling CNN. Mark Thompson, the network’s current chairman, warned staff not to jump to conclusions, but many quickly did. (“We are doomed,” one employee told the media-news site Status. “We are f**ked,” said another.) Many looked at the Ellison-era CBS News as proof of concept; indeed, it’s very possible that that unit will somehow be fused with CNN under the stewardship of Bari Weiss, the anti-woke TV-news neophyte whom David Ellison tapped to lead CBS News in the fall, with results that have, variously, been cringe-inducing, icky, and democratically concerning. “It’s hell over here,” a CBS source told Justin Baragona, a media reporter at the progressive news site Zeteo, last night. The freakout, they added, was justified.

In a general sense, I’d agree. Weiss has not exactly turned CBS News into Pravda—and, as I’ve written before, she appears to be less a Trump lackey and more a standard-bearer for a tedious, adjacent strain of billionaire-class faux-contrarianism. But, at minimum, her corporate overlords clearly seem drunk on some cocktail of cowardice and greed, and the concentration of multiple major news organizations in their hands is precisely the sort of thing that people meant when they warned against the United States turning into Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (And this is without going into Larry Ellison’s stake in the U.S. arm of TikTok.) Indeed, as I see it, no one should get to own two powerful national news networks, regardless of their politics. Similar logic applies—or applied, anyway—to the prospect of Netflix taking over Warner Bros., even without CNN. Given the ghoulishness of the Ellisons, it might have been tempting to cheer Netflix on, as the Good Suitor. But their takeover would have represented an even greater consolidation of corporate power, albeit one set to the jaunty string-pop of “Bridgerton” rather than “The Imperial March.” As Richard Brody observed in December, many Hollywood people saw the prospect as “existential, perhaps portending the end of mainstream moviegoing.” Trump may have been acting disingenuously when he highlighted the resulting market share. But his words weren’t wrong.

This week, I wrote about a much smaller, yet still highly consequential, media merger—a proposed deal for Nexstar, already a prolific owner of local TV stations, to grow further by taking over a rival, Tegna—and how it is contingent on Trump officials doing away with an obscure federal law barring such companies from reaching more than thirty-nine per cent of households nationwide. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is supportive of the Nexstar deal, and of nixing the cap. Other proponents of the deal have sought to assuage concerns about unconstrained broadcast conglomerates by pointing out that D.O.J. antitrust enforcers will still get to weigh in.

For opponents, such reassurances might have carried more weight a year or so ago. Initially, on the subject of antitrust, Trump’s second term looked contiguous with the Biden Administration, which aggressively went after big mergers; Trump’s new antitrust chief, Gail Slater, was plucked from the growing corporate-skeptic wing of the G.O.P., and won praise from many progressives. This impression, however, was always complicated, and as time passed, the enforcers started to look more like enablers. There were growing allegations that MAGA-aligned lobbyists for big corporations were effectively navigating around Slater. This month, she found herself out of a job. Various observers concluded that MAGA’s turn against big business was over, if it was ever sincere to begin with. The Administration appears, increasingly, to favor not only big businesses that Trump likes but big business, period—even if he clearly favors the former much more.

Paramount’s bid now appears to be on a glide path, at least at the federal level. There are still antitrust hurdles to clear: European regulators could object, as could U.S. state officials. (Indeed, the Attorney General of California is already doing so.) But the former hurdle looks easier for Paramount to clear than it would have been for Netflix. And, as Matt Stoller, a researcher who opposes monopoly power, noted prior to yesterday’s news, the last time that states challenged a federally approved merger—between Sprint and T-Mobile, during Trump’s first term—they lost in court. I’ve found myself thinking back, for now, on that first Trump term. I recall being irritated at the time by media coverage of the proposed A.T. & T.–Time Warner deal, much of which focussed on the outrageous apparent premise of Trump’s opposition without really engaging with the substantive reasons to criticize the deal—and these were very real. (It was not for nothing that the tie-up ended in total disaster.) In a speech in 2018, Delrahim, Trump’s antitrust chief, described his legal fight against the Time Warner merger as “potentially historic,” and his broader goal as “protecting American consumers through enforcement of the antitrust laws.” These days, Trump may be back in office, but Delrahim isn’t. He now works for Paramount Skydance, where he is accelerating its merger with Warner Bros. ♦